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Some time passed. Ava worked up the nerve to return to the living room with two porcelain mugs full of freshly brewed green tea. The man on the couch was sitting quietly and expectantly when she returned, as if he had never made any kind of terrifying scene at all. He looked confused when she held his cup out to him, as if he didn’t know what to do with it, but when she sat down and took a sip from hers, he did the same. Only a little tea ended up on the cushions.  

“So.” Ava’s eyes were squeezed shut, her brows knit together, trying to ignore the slurping sounds. “You’re trying to tell me you’re not human.”

“Yes! What exactly is so hard to understand?” The man gave an exasperated groan through the upturned brim of his cup. He’d already drained it- Ava guessed she had been right in thinking he’d been dehydrated. “That was delicious, by the way. What was it?”

“Just green tea,” Ava said, flushing uncomfortably. “I made it from a packet, it really didn’t involve any kind of talent on my part, but-”

“I have no idea what that means. Anyway,” the man cut her off. “I come from another world, one more vast and ancient than a human could ever understand. I am a member of a species leagues beyond your own, a creature of primordial power and turmoil…”

“What’s your name?”

“What?” The man stared at her, seemingly stunned that she’d dared to interrupt him.

“Your name, man. Mine’s Ava. Avalina. Everyone calls me Ava for short. What’s yours? Assuming your vast and primordial species has names.”

“Simon,” he said, so quickly he himself seemed caught by surprise.

Ava glanced at the tv. The contestant was being chewed out by a judge with the name “Simon” engraved on his nameplate in big block letters.

“Mhm,” she said. “That’s a pretty vast and primordial name, alright.”

“No!” he shouted. “That’s not my… that’s not what I said! I said…” his brow wrinkled into a furrow of concentration. “Sie… Zi… Siea….”

He roared in frustration. “I can’t pronounce it with this human mouth! It comes out wrong… it’s not… whatever I said! It’s…”

Ava raised her eyebrows. The guy looked close to breaking down- his whole face was turning red. He was straining his face muscles as if fighting some invisible force.

“Hey, dude, it’s okay,” she said, standing up. “Simon works for now, right? We can sort out the… human mouth problem later. Don’t hurt yourself.”

He stopped and seemed to relax a little. “Well… it’s not anywhere near as majestic and terrifying as my true name, but it’s better than nothing.”

“So… Simon,” Ava said. “I have a lot of questions for you.”

“Oh, by all means. I’m not surprised, after all I’ve said already. This all must be very confusing, but I’m glad to enlighten you on the state of the world as you’ve never known it before-”

“What exactly are you saying you are?” Ava cut him off again. She wasn’t in the mood for the showboating he was trying to do.

“What- oh. Ah, yes, that’s right! I didn’t even mention!” The guy who was apparently for the time being going to go by Simon stood up from the couch. He stumbled a bit, but caught himself and tried to turn the movement into a bow.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you. I am a demon.”

They both stood there in silence for what felt like a full minute.

“…Well!” Ava managed to chirp out. “Why don’t I make us some breakfast! You… clearly need… that is, we could both use some food!”

With that, she vanished up the stairs, practically leaving a dust cloud behind her.

 Ava stood hidden at the top corner of the staircase. She put her hands on her forehead and gripped it, trying to keep it from splitting open. He was insane. She had let a crazy person into her house. What had she been thinking?! What part of her could have ever possibly thought this was a good idea?!

She had to get him to the hospital. That much was obvious. She had to get him out of here and take him someplace he’d be safe. Someplace far, far away from here. But she had to do it without him thinking she didn’t believe him. She didn’t know what he’d do if really confronted, to her or to himself. He’d obviously been through something terrible, this was clearly some kind of coping mechanism, he’d been running all that way in that torn up, bloody suit…

Ava realized he was still wearing that suit. He’d been in it all night, she thought guiltily. It couldn’t be comfortable. He needed clean clothes. She nodded. Clean clothes. She could do that. That was a task she could accomplish. That would take her mind off all this bullshit.

She went to her closet and shifted through the back hangers, producing a white collared shirt and some black jeans. After some consideration, she rooted through the bottom of the closet and found an unopened pack of briefs. She wouldn’t be surprised at all if he needed them.

She took a moment to change out of her pajamas herself- she hadn’t even taken the time to put on clothes before she’d raced downstairs. It couldn’t hurt to look presentable for this. Just as she emerged from her room, feeling slightly less rattled, she heard a loud crunching noise from downstairs.

She raced down the stairs and almost dropped the clothes when she saw the source of the sound. Simon was sitting on the couch, leaning over the table and eating his mug. There was a huge bite taken out of the rim, and she could hear his teeth grinding through a mouthful of porcelain.

Ava’s mouth opened and closed several times before she found her voice. “What… what are you doing?” she practically shrieked.

Simon looked up. “Oh, you changed your outer layer!” he said through a mouthful, white dust trickling out through his teeth. “Are those pieces of cloth for me?”

Ava looked down at the clothes she was holding and back up at the maniac eating dining utensils on her couch. She shook her head and set them down on the table. That was NOT what should be occupying her attention at the moment.

“Why are you eating it?!” she shouted, pointing at the brutalized mug. Simon was still crunching away at it. The handle had almost disappeared. He stared at her, confused. Then he bit into the mug again.

“Bitch!! Stop!” Ava was full on screaming by now. “Spit it out!!!”

Simon just stared at her. Very deliberately, he swallowed.

“You-! What the FUCK!!!” Ava screamed.

“Don’t give me food if you don’t want me to eat it,” he said indignantly.

“THAT WASN’T FOOD!!!”

Simon looked down at the remains of the mug again. “Oh,” he said, sounding a bit disappointed but otherwise completely nonchalant. “Shame. It has a great texture.”

“We’re going to a doctor,” Ava shouted, reaching out to grab his arm. “You need to get your, your stomach pumped, or your fucking teeth replaced, or-”

“What- no!” Simon jumped back. His face had gone white with sudden terror. “You’re not taking me anywhere! No human settlements, no human records, they’ll FIND me!!”

“WHO??”

“The ANGELS!!” Simon shrieked.

Ava stopped in her tracks for about two seconds. Then she rolled her eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake, we’re still doing this, huh?”

“Doing what?! The only thing I’m doing is BEING IN MORTAL DANGER!! I’ve been here too long, I need to keep moving before the angels find me. They have eyes everywhere-”

“THERE ARE NO ANGELS,” Ava shouted in frustration. “Whatever, whoever is chasing you, it is NOT a damn angel!”

Simon fell silent and stared at her with an expression that suggested he’d never even considered a person could be so stupid.

“Look,” Ava said, feeling a bit bad for breaking down the guy’s fantasy. “I can tell you’ve been through a lot. I know you’re freaked out. I would be too! But trust me, whatever’s going on here, there is a logical, earthly explanation. Angels and demons aren’t real, alright?”

Simon just continued staring at her. “I don’t believe it,” he finally said. “Is total ignorance a universal human trait, or are you just special?”

“Look, buddy-”

“I know it’s been a while, but surely you’ve retained SOMETHING… surely you couldn’t be so entirely ungrateful as to have completely FORGOTTEN!” He stood up in indignation, stumbling a little but grabbing the arm of the couch to steady himself. “Surely, they left you all SOMETHING, didn’t they?”

“What are you talking about?!” Ava snapped. She could feel her patience ebbing away. “You’re not making any sense!”

Simon slapped his forehead and opened his mouth, no doubt to shout something else utterly incomprehensible. Then he stopped himself. He looked down at his hands; for a brief moment, something like sorrow crossed his face. Then he looked back up at her with a slightly more patient expression.

“Watch me,” he said simply, and closed his eyes.

He sat back down on the couch, crossed his legs one over the other, folded his hands on his lap, and began breathing deeply. He was perfectly still for almost a minute. Ava considered whether she should do something.

She stopped in her tracks. There was a crackling sound, like bones.

Simon’s shoulders hunched forward. Ava heard tendons cracking and snapping as his head sank down to meet his hands. With an awful crunch, the back of his ruined suit ripped along the seam as some formless thing pressed out from inside his body. The bones of his back creaked and separated as whatever it was pressed outward.

With a wet snap, his back split open. A thin spray of blood spread across the room as a huge, hideous thing, something that looked like a goat skull with a thin layer of grayish skin stretched over it and hundreds of thin, backward-facing horns, emerged from his ruined back, mouth open and full of dog-like teeth. The entire rest of his body folded away from it like a discarded mascot costume, as the skull was followed by hideously long, spindly arms and hands that ended in claws as long as pencils. The thing just kept coming, arms followed by a torso, followed by legs, until the horrible blood-soaked thing towered all the way to the ceiling. It sat in the remains of what had once been a human body, now turned inside out, stuck to it like a half-peeled wrapper. It looked down at Ava, moving its horrible, skeletal head to set its bulging, wild, ancient eyes on hers.

Ava stared. Then she screamed.

A pale ray of sunlight creeped over the tall grass, reaching across the land and creeping in through Ava’s bedroom window. In the upstairs bedroom, she shifted under her heavy quilt as the ray snuck through the blinds to land on her face. Grumbling, she pulled her head under the blanket and curled up, searching for more sleep.

            The events of the previous night returned to her just as her phone alarm started blaring in her ear. She shot up out of bed, sending the blanket flying, and crashed onto the floor. Her panicked momentum carried her across the floor so fast that she didn’t even bother to stand up before snagging the doorknob and thrashing out into the hall. A thousand nightmare scenarios rushed through her head as she flew down the stairs; had he already stolen everything she owned? Had whoever was following him managed to track him down? Was a knife fight happening in her living room at that very moment?? Or maybe he himself was the dangerous one- maybe he’d woken up and was waiting just outside the stairway door to ambush her with a steak knife?

This thought stopped her in her tracks just as she reached the last step. Holding her breath, she slid up to the door and pressed her ear against it, listening for something, anything that might give her a hint as to what was happening. But she couldn’t hear anything- no labored breathing, no blade scraping against the wood, no muffled screams or evil laughter. Just the gentle thumping of her heartbeat pounding in her ears. After listening for almost two minutes, she sighed quietly and decided that in any case, a stab wound and trip to the hospital would net her some paid vacation time from work, so really, she didn’t have much to lose. She pushed the door open and peeked out into the darkened living room.

Nothing was out of the ordinary. A soft breathing sound from the couch caught her attention- she turned her head and saw a shape on the cushions, wreathed in blankets. Her guest was still lying there in the same spot as before, seemingly still fast asleep. He had wrapped himself in the blanket like it was a cocoon and was curled into a tight ball, snoring softly.

Ava let out a long breath of relief. Nothing was wrong. Nothing to panic about. Sure, there was a complete stranger sleeping in her home, but at least he wasn’t currently trying to kill her. Beggars can’t be choosers.

She crossed the room and sat down in the chair next to the couch, deciding to keep an eye on him while she collected her thoughts. Absent-mindedly, her hand went to the remote and the tv screen lit up. Some game show contestant was sweating over a question about the Andes. Ava laced her fingers together and rested her chin on her clasped hands. What to do now? The guy would probably need medical help soon, after all he’d seemingly been through. She should have taken him out to the hospital in town the night before, she thought guiltily, but she realized she hadn’t been thinking straight. Panic had seized her.

So, the hospital… but what if whoever was chasing him found him there? For that matter, who was chasing him? All the worst-case scenarios went whirling through her mind- the mafia, a serial killer, the cops, family, a serial killer mafia cop family… one thing was certain, anyway- whoever it was, they had scared the guy something serious. Would he be safe at a hospital? Would it be worth it to get his injuries treated? She sighed with frustration. This would be so much easier if she could just talk to the guy…

A sharp cough shook her out of her thoughts. Her eyes flicked over to the couch and she froze. Her guest was sitting up, half-buried in blankets, staring at her with wide eyes.

“Now that I have your attention,” he said in a strained, deliberate voice, “do you think you could be so kind as to tell me where exactly I am?”

Ava was frozen to her seat. She wasn’t ready for him to wake up. She didn’t have a plan yet. She was flying blind, right into a hailstorm.

The man was still talking. “…Not to seem rude, of course, not to suggest this isn’t a nice little place you’ve carved out for yourself, as humble as it is. It’s just that I’d like to be quite sure they can’t find me here. You understand. They won’t be happy with either of us, and-”

“Whoa whoa whoa, just… just hang on.” Ava finally managed to find her footing enough to speak. “Who are ‘they’? Who the hell was chasing you last night??”

He stopped short. His mouth flapped a couple times, as if he was trying to figure out exactly what to say.

“Do you,” he finally managed, “…know who I am?”

Ava frowned. “Should I?”

He was still for a long moment, processing this. His eyes turned from Ava to the tv, and then swept across the room, taking everything in. Finally, he turned back to her.

“You’re a human.”

“…What?” Ava said.

The man stared into Ava’s eyes with a grave, cold expression. Then, slowly, a crooked grin began to spread across his face. Abruptly he doubled over with harsh, high pitched laughter, so loud and darkly gleeful that Ava reflexively jumped back.

“Oh, you shouldn’t have stopped,” he said between laughs, in the voice of someone eagerly watching the start of a train wreck. “Oh Mother, you should not have stopped for me.”

Ava stood up and drew back towards the kitchen. The man on her couch was still laughing, silhouetted in the harsh light of the tv.

“Look, I am not dealing with this right after I wake up,” she said. “And you, you’re clearly a little dehydrated. I need… we need drinks.”

The sky was like a dome of frosted glass, and a ring of bright yellow moisture hung in the air around the moon, portending rain but never promising it. The air was as hot and wet as the damp, untilled soil below it, and the only sound was the hissing insects, until they were joined by the approaching sound of cracking sticks and grasses.

Something big was moving through the field. Something too big and clumsy to be a coyote or even a deer. The bugs began to fall silent as it approached, as if in confusion. Heavy footfalls slapped the earth desperately and something gasped and choked at the soggy air as it struggled to pick up speed.

In the distance, something was following. It was slower, but much larger. The ground began to rumble, and more bugs fell silent.

The running thing let out a pained cry and struggled on. The grass behind it was streaked with red.

               Ava gripped the steering wheel with one hand and pressed the other to her forehead, half to blot the gathering beads of sweat and half to ward off the beginnings of a headache. The road ahead of her had turned almost completely from pavement to dirt, or at the very least, to very dirty pavement. Everything outside the glow of her headlights was pitch black. Everything more than two feet away from her dashboard was pitch black. The only sounds were the steady drone of her tires and the fuzzy transmission of Bon Jovi’s Wanted Dead or Alive struggling through her beat-up radio speakers. A smile almost had the chance to form on her face as she thought of that time when her mom was mad at her in the grocery store and started singing that other Bon Jovi song- It’s Life or something- at the top of her lungs just to embarrass her. It died quickly, though, replaced by a sudden and unwelcome sensation of hot mist forming in her eyes. The road blurred. Her hand leapt from her forehead to the knob and she turned the station.

The strains of some Michael Jackson song leapt out at her, causing her to jump.

As she realized what had happened, she found herself chuckling. “Dammit, Mike,” she muttered to herself, blinking away the mist in her eyes. She always got so jumpy on night drives. If the volume had been any higher, she’d have gone down in history as the only person to ever die in a fatal Michael Jackson-induced car wreck. Still chuckling to herself, she squeezed her eyes shut to clear away the last of the pre-waterworks.

            When her eyes opened, she found herself blinking in surprise. Something up ahead was moving in the grass, just beyond a bend in the road.

She squinted and slowed to a crawl, confusion and a sudden wave of apprehension filling her mind. This was the middle of a deserted wheat field. There was no one out here, no life form large enough to be visible from that distance at night. She hadn’t seen so much as another set of headlights in almost half an hour. She must have just imagined it.

But, no, there it was again. Some big black shape crashing through the grass. Moving… toward the road…?

            Ava managed to slam on her brakes just before the shape came crashing out of the wall of wheat and sprawling out onto the pavement. It just barely managed to catch itself before falling with a wide, sprawling stride as it fumbled toward the car.

Ava was terrified for a split second, before her eyes processed the shape. It was a human; a man, it seemed. He was wearing a suit, one that must have been fancy and expensive at some point, but now it was ripped into ribbons, caked with dirt and blood, barely holding itself together by its seams. Although she couldn’t quite tell from a distance, she thought she could see blood on his face too.

Not only that, he wasn’t just running. He was sprinting. The kind of wide, flailing, desperate sprint you usually only saw in zombie movies. His chest was heaving and pumping like the engine of a sinking ship, so hard she could see it from yards away. His legs were limp and splaying irregularly, his arms grasping out as if trying to pull himself through the air ahead of him. It wasn’t so much a sprint as a steady, sprawling fall forward, a desperate plea to gravity to carry him just a little bit farther now that his legs had nearly given out. This guy wasn’t running towards her; he was running from something.

            Ava watched, equal parts frightened and awestruck, as he sprawled into the street. One foot slipped out from under him and he went down hard- Ava could almost hear the crack of bone on pavement- but he just grabbed at the stone with his hands and pulled himself up, barely missing a beat before he was running again. As he got closer, she slowly made out the expression on his face. It was a mixture of pain and abject terror.

She didn’t stop herself. She didn’t even notice what she was doing. As he rocketed toward the car, she popped her passenger side door open, leaned her head out and shouted, “Get in!”

            His bloodshot eyes met hers and he stumbled briefly, confusion coloring his expression, as if trying to see if this was some kind of trap. But barely a second later he was peeling off in a wide turn towards the car door, grabbing it desperately, pulling himself in, sprawling into the seat, yanking the door shut behind him and croaking out in a pained voice, “Go!! GO!!”